The thought of government setting down Internet ground rules to protect private information and prevent repeats of Facebook’s data scandal may seem attractive. But that’s exactly how the curtailment of free speech starts, with a regulatory reform that sounds so obviously helpful and necessary that its implementation feels almost mundane. That’s what the Vietnamese government is counting on this week as it introduces a new cyber law that it insists is needed to combat online terrorism and spying.

Building on the 10,000-member cyber warfare military unit the country launched in 2017 to fight “wrong views,” Vietnam is now setting out with its latest regulations to sanitize what those in the country can read online. As well as mandating that Internet companies such as Google and Facebook record and keep data on their users (in case the Vietnamese government wants to sneak a look or 10, at any point in the future), the law demands that these same companies take down anything on their sites that Vietnamese authorities find “toxic.”

To LamWikipedia Commons

Throwing people in prison for online expressions of disapproval of the Vietnamese government, the country’s leaders have already been actively shutting down dissent before the implementation of the new regulations; but putting individuals behind bars was not enough. Vietnamese authorities wanted to be able to dispense with the critiques entirely, wiping them from Facebook status updates before they could spread, a more efficient way to erase public anti-state sentiment — an essential task for a one-party government and one they will now be able to accomplish with ease.

Vietnam’s leaders have offered the usual dressed-up reasons for their harsh cyberlaw. How else could the country “create new dynamism”? What better way to “advance integration and connectivity”? We have been told by Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security Tô Lâm that the law is “essential,” the only means by which to head off major cyberattacks. Does monitoring the feeds of Vietnam’s 60 million Facebook users accomplish this goal? Stop asking distracting questions and just be happy that Internet users in Vietnam will finally be protected.

“The cyber security law does nothing to protect internet users,” say members of the United States’ Congressional Vietnam caucus in a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The letter points out that the new law is “broad and vaguely worded” and will “allow the communist authorities to access private data, spy on users, and further restrict the limited online freedoms enjoyed by Vietnamese citizens.” The Vietnam caucus is quite right about all of this, of course.

Vietnamese authorities are instituting (or escalating) an online crackdown on free expression; they’re not starting a consumer safety revolution. It’s no coincidence that Vietnam ranks 175th out of 180 countries on Reporters Without Borders’s 2018 World Press Freedom Index. Let’s hope that the United States politicians remember how easily such hollow “protection” justifications come, though, when making their own Internet regulations.

In Vietnam, dissident artist and former pop star Do Nguyen Mai Khoi is one of those brave enough to come out against her country’s new cyberlaw. “We are losing the only space where we can express ourselves freely,” she has said. She knows what she’s talking about, having used Facebook to campaign when she ran as an independent for Vietnam’s national assembly. There would have been few other safe ways for her to get out the word.

In the West, the focus now is on what some regulation advocates term the “weaponization of data”: basically, Facebook carelessly throwing around its users’ personal information and allowing foreign entities to manipulate U.S. elections. And Facebook facilitating the spread of fake news and dangerous hate. There’s a real basis for the concern; yet there’s also evidence of how easily such concern can slide into calls for censorship of the same flavour as the cyber law being implemented in Vietnam, even if the intent is a great deal more benign. A recent U.K. bill made it a crime to look at terrorist-related information online more than twice. The motive of protection is obvious, yet what is and isn’t terrorist-related is far from clear cut (and may not be something we should be comfortable to have decided by whoever happens to be in power), and what of accessing such materials for research or even simply to understand the current situation of the world?

Censorship is dangerous, even when it’s not a one-party government putting it in place.

For the sake of the future of free speech in the West, we should pay attention to the steady erosion of free speech in Vietnam and be as chilled by it as we would by similar measures taken here. Because that may happen sooner than we think.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has released its last budget before the fall federal election

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